The Ornamental Tobacco Plant Can Be Soothing To Your Health

July 5, 1986|By Art Kozelka, Chicago Tribune

One kind of tobacco that everyone can enjoy without a health risk is making a comeback in home gardens, due largely to dramatic refinements by hybridizers. It is called nicotiana, a close kin of the commercially grown tobacco, and is popularly known as flowering ornamental tobacco.

An old-fashioned garden plant, nicotiana in past years tended to be tall (3 or more feet high) and lanky, but even so it was valued for its white, tubular blossoms that opened only at dusk or during cloudy weather to release their delicate fragrance. The modern hybrid versions, however, offer many appealing changes.

Plants now are shorter and more compact, ideal for borders, and come in a range of colors, including shades of pink, red, lime-green, purple and yellow, as well as white. Important, too, is that they have gained the ability to remain open on sunny days, though the scent of some is less evident.

Seeds can be sown now; but for earlier flowering, you can start with young, ready-to-plant nicotianas available in pots, packs or flats at garden centers. The plants should be spaced a foot to 18 inches apart. By early summer, loose bunches of the trumpet-shaped blooms will rise above the broad, bright green leaves of the plants.

The Nicki hybrids are perhaps the most popular of the modern nicotianas. These free-flowering plants grow a foot to 18 inches tall and flourish in sunny or partly shaded flower beds as well as in containers. An even shorter strain is the Tinkerbelle mixture. These plants grow 10 inches to a foot high and are suitable for borders.

Where taller flowers are desired, the Sensation nicotianas are a good choice, growing to 2 1/2 feet high. Their sweet-scented blossoms make excellent cut flowers for fresh bouquets.

Nicotianas are relatively free of pests and disease. They like a moist soil and occasional applications of a complete fertilizer.

Plants can be kept neat until frost by snipping off stalks of spent flowers, which will be quickly replaced by new blooms.